Content tagged "space stations".
3 items (3 articles, 0 stories)
A candle flame points upward because gravity moves the air around it, not because fire itself wants to climb. On a space station, with convection gone, that same flame collapses into a round, quiet, blue ball.
Gravity makes crystals settle unevenly, leaving a jumble of grain sizes. So Merck grew crystals of the cancer drug Keytruda aboard the International Space Station, where microgravity produced a uniform 39-micrometer grain. That quiet orbital experiment is already shaping up a shot that could replace a hospital IV drip.
A spacewalk to swap out a single component on the ISS usually runs 5 to 8 hours. Before that, astronauts spend hours breathing pure oxygen to purge nitrogen from their bodies, and rack up roughly 7 hours of pool training for every hour they'll spend outside. SORABUMI walks through what 'fixing something' really means in orbit, starting from the prep work.